The term of art for when some speech is removed from a magazine or broadcast or book or web article is, depending on how and why it is done, “expurgation” or “redaction” or, more to the point, “censorship.” We give a bit of a different spin on it depending on the case. If it’s a network bleeping out swear words in a “live” news broadcast (which actually runs on a few-second delay for just this reason), that raises fewer concerns than if it’s pulling books out of stores because they criticize the president. It is, shall we say, a spectrum.

It’s a matter of judgment, and it can therefore be subject to abuse or simple incompetence. Today, though, censorship is increasingly outsourced to artificial intelligence. And this political choice is being pushed as inevitable and innocuous under the guise of euphemisms such as “content moderation.” People saying cruel and nasty or misinformative things to one another predates the internet. But you’d never know that when reading about the crisis of “toxic misinformation” that isn’t being sufficiently “moderated” online.